What is Mobile CI/CD?
In our previous article, I talked about what CI/CD and a pipeline is in general. Today, I will dive deeper with details about Mobile CI/CD.
First of all, let’s clarify one thing: Even though mobile CI/CD is a beast of its own, it is still CI/CD in essence.
Just like how mobile app development is different from traditional development approaches, mobile CI/CD requires a different mindset than traditional CI/CD.
Regardless, mobile CI/CD approaches are determined by the limitations of the mobile platforms, namely iOS and Android.
As an example, you can build iOS apps only on Xcode and not any other tool. (Any platform that has the ability to build iOS apps uses Xcode no matter what.) You can run Xcode only on macOS and you can run macOS virtual machines only on Macs itself.
In other fields, you may have gotten used to see CI/CD practices being highly flexible and open, but unlike the CI/CD flows in other stacks that are more or less free and open with the options to set up on any OS and hardware; you have to have access to a Mac to build iOS apps and to use the iOS simulator.
Moreover, the specific knowledge set required for building and distributing mobile apps also has an effect on the roles who are executing mobile CI/CD.
In other stacks, there are usually DevOps specialists who handle the full process and developers don’t worry about establishing a pipeline, but in mobile development, CI/CD is more dependent on developer roles maybe except in a handful of large enterprises.
And this is exactly why there is a need for specialized mobile CI/CD tools that promise ease of use such as Appcircle instead of generic CI/CD tools like Jenkins.
Briefly, mobile CI/CD is the adaptation of CI/CD practices and flows to accommodate unique needs mandated by Apple and Google while “democratizing” the CI/CD implementations to be done by the developers instead of CI/CD specialists.
In the upcoming articles, I will be talking about why you should implement mobile CI/CD with further discussions on the limitations and the issues specific to the mobile development stack.
